Any comments on the AI revolution?

[phppup]

I recently dabbled with some AI after a webinar that proclaimed its wonders.

Luke everything else, some features were good, others not so much.

I asked it for some code and immediately recognized the response was accepted from W3. LOL

Are there any worthwhile AI applications that are especially helpful for PHP? Javascript? HTML or CSS?

Curious, but still prefer finding my own answers and coming to phpfreaks when stumped.

[requinix]

"Revolution"? lol. It's another Whatever from the tech world. It's not the first fad used to pump up stock prices, and it won't be the last.

The current state of glorified autocomplete systems AI contributes just about as much value to the world as The Blockchain does. You remember that whole thing? Wasn't that long ago when The Blockchain was being called a "revolution" too...

The next Whatever will happen in a few weeks, or months, or years, and every publicly-traded company will jump on that as fast as they can too. (Make sure you're not still holding onto all of your NVDA when that happens.)
And I'm sure that'll bring its own "revolution" too.

[gizmola]

The main issue I see with AI coding tools is that you still need to be able to understand the syntax and code that the AI tools generate.  As with anything that is changing rapidly, a significant investment in time is required.  From what I've seen demonstrated (and beyond the simple things I have available to me when I'm using VSCode) there are some impressive demonstrations I've seen where new features can be added to existing well structured and formalized code (typically already built in a framework that provides a formalized base) and I could see how AI can be a very effective way of producing what many code generation and boilerplate tools do now, to various degrees of effectiveness.  What I've seen in these demonstrations is that the people who are using the tools have spent a lot of time preparing them, determining what types of groundwork and templating is needed, understanding the most effective prompts to construct, and in general, spending a lot of time (and money) in the AI tools.  There are also significant privacy and security concerns in sending all of your code up into an AI hive, which is also absorbing that for its own ongoing LLM training.

I would also point out that the top practitioners in the PHP development world, employ a variety of tools, and practices, using their IDE and various plugins to produce better tested and more standardized code.   Static analysis, unit testing and other automated testing tools, etc.  In the world of object oriented programming there is an entire layer of sophistication in regards to the employment of OOP design patterns which are often used by those who have developed expertise and experience.   As one quite simple but important example, more than a few PHP frameworks, including the community leading ones (Laravel and Symfony) are built upon the foundational design pattern of Dependency Injection.  To be effective with either of these frameworks, a developer needs to know what DI is, what problems it solves, and how to use the pattern in their own code.  You generate some AI code, and now you're looking at it, and an obvious question becomes: how is this generated code structured?  Does it use a design pattern?  If so, which one(s) and were those applied appropriately in regards to the requirements?  Did the underlying architecture of the code come with limits or flaws that will only be obvious when the next feature needs to be added?  How is a "vibe" coder who doesn't really understand any of these things, or for that matter the application code they generated going to figure this out?